i don't know where you got this information, but by far and large the OM
phones have never been touted as ready for end users by OM, or by the
developers working on the neo1973 or freerunner software.
while i share your angst that the phone has been out for so long and
software is still pretty rough around most of the corners, i deal with
the fact that it's still a "developer phone". it has minor flaws and
sometimes major flaws. but for the most part, it -is- usable as a daily
phone. i use shr-unstable and my primary use of it is text messaging
with occasional telephone calls. i'm aware of a number of bugs and that
BT doesn't yet work for me. however there's a push the last few days on
BT and some people have reported some successes so when i get my phone
back from getting a buzz fix, i'll eagerly try it out.
if the speaker volume is low, turn it up. unstable? have you updated
software on it? currently i am now dealing with the ar6000 kernel
wedging and ophonekitd crashing on every other event. otherwise it's
pretty stable. too slow? yes, it's slow. see numerous other
discussions on this for the reasons why. can it be improved? yes, some
things can, some things cannot. battery hungry? turn off features like
GPS, WiFi, set your backlight to lower intensity, etc. just like any
other cellphone, if you have -everything- enabled and are online doing
stuff constantly, it -will- eat the battery. it is not the most
efficient piece of hardware on the market but it is far from horrible.
as to PDA and no usable software, without saying what you want to do i
can't suggest anything. for me it works rather well. i can ssh around
and do stuff which is my predominate need.
i can't speak for other distributions except for shr-unstable and
gentoo. shr-u appears to have the most conversation going on about it.
gentoo is my preferred distribution and when i get my phone back that's
what i'll be using. however most irc chat and mailing list chat does
seem to be around shr-u. considering this, and that i can say it's
"pretty good" from personal experience - try it.
-david
Joerg Lippmann wrote:
> When will that be? When the device is completely obsolete?
>> Sorry, but after a year of waiting I still have an expensive brick that I can
> neither use as a proper phone (speaker still WAY to low, too unstable, too
> slow, too battery-hungry) nor as a PDA (no usable software available). So I
> really regret my decision to buy it. But then again, it was touted as a real
> phone for end-users back then and being a happy Linux-User for 14 years, I
> thought that I could live with some minor flaws...
>> I'm really for the idea of freeing the phone (thats why I bought one), free
> hardware and the community. And I really loved to see this effort to succeed.
> But I came to realize that I start to hate this sluggish, instable device
> without good software. I cannot help it. I haven't found a single distro that
> works well out of the box. The best ones so far were QTopia/QTe and Android.
> And neither are really community efforts. So I consider my personal experiment
> (buying a community-driven phone for 300 EUR) as failed. Sorry.
>